There's a dragon on the cover of my next book.Fortunately, it’s just an illustration. Those of you who subscribe to Dragon Fancy, the magazine that runs ads for swimming-pool-sized litter boxes and chain-mail-wearing chew toys, will be wondering about the breed. Well, it’s not a Norwegian Ridgeback, nor is it a Hungarian Horntail. It’s not even an Inflammatory Innuendo, although that may be implied. It’s a Comburant Oxidatrix, native to the land of Congroo, and her name is Phlogiston. (The book’s name is What We Found in the Corn Maze and How It Saved a Dragon. Coming to a dungeon near you May 5, 2020.)

It turns out the reason nobody’s ever gotten magic to work is, magic only works for seven minutes each day. And they’re not even consecutive minutes. A minute here, a minute there – you barely have time to recite an incantation to kick off a spell, or, more often than not, the minute’s over and you’ve only spoken two syllables of your final abracadabra, and the lost coins you hoped to magically gather from the schoolyard are still lost and show no signs of bestirring themselves to fill your empty, much-recycled lunch bag. So you have to wait for the next Magic Minute to roll around, and it might be hours away, and you might get interrupted, or mispronounce alakazam, and blow it all over again. That’s the premise of my next book, What We Found in the Corn Maze and How It Saved a Dragon.The book has nothing to do with the kind of wizard pictured above. The wizard above, with his unique approach to the problem of crocodile storage, is just an image lifted from an old 19th-century magic-lantern slide, which is a source I tirelessly plunder whenever I’m in need of some public-domain eye candy. I’ve stuck another lantern-slide image below. Staring at it long enough should cause the bargain-basement Dumbledore to conjure a demon. Staring at it a little longer should banish the demon back to Bogeyland, and good riddance. (More on the upcoming book in the next post.)

What We Found in the Sofa is now a required college textbook, at least for the fall 2016 semester - or until somebody comes to their senses - if you happen to be a Library Science student taking the Lit and Resources: Children course (LIS 403 LEA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana. There are 55 other books on the required list, including The Cat in the Hat and Where the Wild Things Are, which, like Sofa, don’t have SparkNotes, so the course will not be a pushover.

And while I would never presume to judge any of the other books on the list, I have to say that Goodnight Moon has always put me to sleep.

It’s been a while since we checked back with the French edition of What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World, or, as we like to call it, Ce qu'on a trouvé dans le canapé, puis comment on a sauvé le monde (as long as there is no one around to correct our pronunciation) and it turns out at least one reader liked it. The erudite, tea-drinking, and well-traveled blogger at Le Rose et le Noir called it a brilliantly wacky adventure novel, and recognized that the delicious word play (“de jeux de mots savoureux”) must have been a real headache to translate. (It was. The translator, Nathalie Bru, sent me a bill for 3 bottles of asperine. (Asperine is French for Tylenol.) Clicking the review will take you to the website, for those of you who wish to discover how little of your high school French you remember.

If you are a kid, and you're reading this, this is where your teacher came up with all those questions about similes and metaphors and genres. If you read the educator's guide, you'll be able to raise your hand and pose some tough questions of your own. Go ahead. Turn the tables. Your teacher will either give you extra credit, or send you to the principal's office for wising off.

Reporters have been lining the sidewalk in front of my house (mainly with cigarette butts and candy wrappers) eager to learn my reaction to What We Found in the Sofaplacing sixth in Maryland’s 2015 Black-Eyed Susan Book Award.

Well boys, I’ll give it to you straight. While it’s not the gold medal, nor the silver, nor the bronze, nor the bauxite, nor the potash, it is, after all, the mercury, a medal which, if worn around the neck, tends to make a mess of one’s shirt, but it’s still an honor, and I’m happy to have received it. (It was wonderful just to have been on the list.)

People express surprise that there are medals beyond bronze, but of course there are. In addition to the aforementioned bauxite, potash, and mercury, there's zinc, asbestos, and cubic zirconia. Hemingway used to lie in bed with his asbestos medal on his chest and use it as an ash tray, until the day he missed and set fire to his chest hair, which Gertrude Stein found hilarious. (The chest hair; not necessarily the fact that Hemingway set fire to it.) The lead medal, for tenth place, was discontinued in 1922 when a broad-shouldered judge casually tossed one around James Joyce's neck and Joyce fell forward down three flights of stairs. This not only marked the end of the lead medal, but also of the dais upon which awards are presented being any more than two feet high. Joyce claimed the fall did him no harm, but the next thing he wrote was Finnegans Wake.

Now, while there is no requirement that the nominated authors each write an essay about their personal relationship with Mark Twain, I have decided to include one here, just in case the rules change at the last minute and such an essay IS required, and none of the other authors submit one in time and I win by default. (The other authors should understand that this is just a joke, and they should not even bother outlining a prospective essay about their PR with MT. A better use of their time would be responding to those pesky line-edits they’ve been putting off all week.) My fourth-grade class trip was to Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. Our teacher, Evadne Lovett, had been reading Tom Sawyeraloud to us each afternoon and she decided the home of a writer would be a perfect field-trip destination. I don’t know how my fellow ten-year-olds responded (although some of them, upon learning the house was built to resemble a riverboat, ran through its halls shouting “Man overboard!” so I will cautiously say enthusiastically) but for me it was a life-changing trip. I bought my first adult-level book in the gift shop. Up until then, my book-buying budget – approximately three dollars per year – had been spent on Hardy Boys mysteries and Tom Swift science fiction. In the Twain shop I purchased my very first paperback, an anthology entitled A Laurel Reader MARK TWAIN. (I have it to this day. Here’s the scan to prove it.)

The first grown-up book I ever bought.

The book was a jumble of short stories and excerpts from longer works, and the mix was exactly right to stimulate the over-active imagination of a ten-year-old aspiring writer. (Mrs. Lovett, four months earlier, had encouraged me to read aloud my essay about how I had spent Christmas break, during which, allegedly, I had mistaken a local poet for Santa Claus. The line “I looked out the window and what did I see? A big fat beatnik smilin' at me,” got a solid laugh from a crowd predisposed to find anything with the word “beatnik” in it hysterical, and I became forever hooked on the writing thing. If my classmates had sat there stone-faced I’d be a mortician today.) The Laurel Reader, in addition to the diaries of Adam and Eve, the inevitable Jumping Frog story, and “Cannibalism in the Cars” (in which passengers on a snowbound train vote on the order in which they should be eaten, something that rarely occurred in Hardy Boys stories, where it was usually the big guy with the baseball bat who got first dibs) included most of the epigrams from "Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar," which were essentially nineteenth-century one-liners and made enough of an impression on me that I started jotting down my own Profound Thoughts in something that, by high school, I was calling Paranoid Wilson’s Notebook. Here’s an entry from Twain’s Pudd’nhead: Adam was but human -- this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.Here’s an entry from Paranoid Wilson’s Notebook:

Is he stifling a yawn, or aiming a blowgun? Don’t take any chances; kick him in the face.

Twain’s point may have been more trenchant, but I feel I win when it comes to brevity.

To this day I still add thoughts to Paranoid Wilson’s Notebook (most recently: “November became National Novel Writing Month because ‘Novel’ and ‘November’ both start with the same five letters, but I can’t see how anyone can expect me to write a novel after I’ve just spent the entire previous month octopus fishing,”) and sometimes I read through it, looking for inspiration when the writing isn’t going all that well, as, obviously, it doesn’t too often. All of which I trace back to that 1962 field trip to Mark Twain’s house. (Evadne Lovett, Brown University graduate, Daughter of the American Revolution, member of the League of Women Voters and the John Greenleaf Whittier Society, died at the age of 96 in 2007, six years before I published my first book. She probably knew I’d be a late bloomer. So, even though I'm way behind with my gratitude - thank you Mrs. Lovett!)

Lately, my daughter has been urging me to get in touch with my inner candy store and so, for Father’s Day, she gave me the two chocolate bars that have been the bane of my existence since elementary school.

I can still vividly recall the sixth-grade girl who, every time she saw me, would shout out, “Oh Henry – I want a Clark bar!” I’m pretty sure this had something to do with my name, although, to be fair, it may only have been a coincidence and she may only have been very hungry. Still, I concede I’m better off than my aunt, Baby Ruth Zagnut, and my cousin, Rolo Kitkat. And, oh yeah, my college roommate, Chunky Butterfinger.

Since I think the artwork for The Book that Proves Time Travel Happens is both wonderful and not reproduced large enough in the book, I’m delighted that the enterprising artists have made some of the images available on objects that allow it to be

rendered in sizes larger than a Moby-Dick doubloon. (Above is the Moby-Dick doubloon from chapter 24 of The Book that Proves Time Travel Happens – and, oh yeah, chapter 36 of Moby-Dick – a coin only slightly larger than a postage stamp. Art really deserves more space.) The brothers Eric and Terry Fan have made it possible to enjoy their art while drinking from it, wearing it, or sitting on it, which is more than Rembrandt ever did with his art, or could have imagined doing.(Clicking on an image will take you to the site where it’s being offered, and where you might find merchandise even more intriguing, and - surprise - not necessarily connected to my time travel book.)

The centurion's helmet from chapter 2, reproduced on a pencil skirt. Beats anything you'll ever see on QVC.

Those of you who fled to Montreal to avoid the excessive hype surrounding the release of my second book are probably outraged by the O. Henry twist of discovering the French edition of my FIRST book crowding out Jules Verne in all the Canadian bookstores. Well, serves you right.

The French edition is a beauty – technically a livre, and not a book: livres are taller with a slight bevel to the page corners – and wonderfully translated by Nathalie Bru, who, the title page wants you to know, was working from a manuscript in United States English, rather than, say, British English, which, I’ll be the first to admit, probably made the entire enterprise much more of a challenge. (Whether or not she translated the book into Canadian French, those of you in self-imposed exile will have to tell me.)

Nathalie Bru, translator extraordinaire.

The cover design is by Jean-Francois Martin. It says on his website that doing the cover helped him prepare for the World Typo Championship, which this year will be held in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch, Whales. (This is my own somewhat free translation of"Jean-François Martin se prépare pour le championnat du monde de typo avec une nouvelle couverture pour un roman des éditions Les Grands Personnes écrit par Henry Clark et intitulé Ce qu'on a trouvé dans le canapé puis comment on a sauvé le monde." It's possible Llanfairpwllgwyngyll-gogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch wasn't really mentioned.) (And I know it's Wails and not Whales; I was just attempting a little "typo" humor.)

Here's the back cover. I'm pretty sure the bit about me translates as "Henry Clark spends an awful lot of time on his sofa." (It's as if the French can see into my living room!)

And here's a map of the Paris Metro, with the names of the stations replaced with the titles of this spring's more interesting Young Adult books. (Clicking it will make it full size, but be prepared to jump back.) My book's the third stop on the red "Inclassable" line, making it an easy walk to the Louvre and the Apple store. (I'm hoping Inclassable means "unclassifiable," rather than "not classy.")

The book was actually printed in Spain, so, in future, I intend telling people I had both a French edition and a Spanish edition. This is one of the few benefits of outsourcing.

And - - I've just been informed the French edition has sold over trois copies! If I recall correctly from high school, trois is French for million! Incroyable!